Strange True Stories of Louisiana Read online

  HOW I GOT THEM.

  1882-89.

  True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of realmen and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artisticwhole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarryor gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony ofvalues and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--notso much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.

  Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once Ithought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into myhands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whosecharms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least towarn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without beingnecessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and followone another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right ofdiscovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes thestory-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge;but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed"restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essentialfeature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened,all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.

  In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend Dr. FrancisBacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation turning, at theclose of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic true happenings, hesaid:

  "You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome Mueller?"

  "No."

  Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by mail, to myhome in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a transcription, which he hadmost generously made, of a brief summary of the case--it would be right tosay tragedy instead of case--as printed in "The Law Reporter" some fortyyears ago. That transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The SupremeCourt of the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigateand decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come under thecognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which had been the causeof public excitement within the memory of men still living on the scene,I, a native resident of New Orleans and student of its history, stumbledupon for the first time nearly two thousand miles from home.

  I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another.None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed to a formerchief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of everymember of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case hehad no recollection. One of the medical experts called in by the court forevidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was stillliving--the distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He couldnot recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in thevaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took downfrom his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme courtdecisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the oldnewspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasurespeedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusionsto the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find inthose days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and asteamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recordedin ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and, afterfollowing and abandoning several false trails through two days' search,found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had beenlost, having unaccountably disappeared in--if I remember aright--1870.

  There was one chance left: it was to find the original papers. I employedan intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should findthem. In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings--the old SpanishCabildo, that faces Jackson Square--he rummaged for ten days, finding nowone desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one.Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of thefloor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet Iwas content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and theintervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy ofthe court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lostand found Salome Mueller. How through the courtesy of some of thereportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I found and conversed withthree of Salome's still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stopto tell.

  While I was still in search of these things, the editor of the "NewOrleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examineand pronounce upon its merits. It was written wholly in French, in asmall, cramped, feminine hand. I replied, when I could, that it seemed tome unfit for the purposes of transient newspaper publication, yet if hedeclined it I should probably buy it myself. He replied that he hadalready examined it and decided to decline it, and it was only to knowwhether I, not he, could use it that I had been asked to read it.

  I took it to an attorney, and requested him, under certain strictconditions, to obtain it for me with all its rights.

  "What is it?"

  "It is the minute account, written by one of the travelers, a prettylittle Creole maiden of seventeen, of an adventurous journey made, in1795, from New Orleans through the wilds of Louisiana, taking six weeks tocomplete a tour that could now be made in less than two days."

  But this is written by some one else; see, it says

  [Handwriting: Voyage de ma grand'mere]

  "Yes," I rejoined, "it purports to be a copy. We must have the littlegrandmother's original manuscript, written in 1822; that or nothing."

  So a correspondence sprang up with a gentle and refined old Creole ladywith whom I later had the honor to become acquainted and now count amongmy esteemed friends--grand-daughter of the grandmother who, afterinnumerable recountings by word of mouth to mother, sisters, brothers,friends, husband, children, and children's children through twenty-sevenyears of advancing life, sat down at last and wrote the oft-told tale forher little grand-children, one of whom, inheriting her literary instinctand herself become an aged grandmother, discovers the manuscript amongsome old family papers and recognizes its value. The first exchange ofletters disclosed the fact that the "New Orleans Bee" ("L'Abeille") hadbought the right to publish the manuscript in French; but the moment itseditors had proper assurance that there was impending another arrangementmore profitable to her, they chivalrously yielded all they had bought, onmerely being reimbursed.

  The condition that required the delivery of the original manuscript,written over sixty years before, was not so easily met. First came theassurance that its spelling was hideous, its writing bad and dimmed bytime, and the sheets tattered and torn. Later followed the disclosure thatan aged and infirm mother of the grandmother owned it, and that she hadsome time before compelled its return to the private drawer from which therelic-loving daughter had abstracted it. Still later came a letter sayingthat since the attorney was so relentlessly exacting, she had written toher mother praying her to part with the manuscript. Then followed anothercommunication,--six large, closely written pages of despair,--inclosing aletter from the mother. The wad of papers, always more and more in the wayand always "smelling bad," had been put into the fire. But a telegramfollowed on the heels of the mail, crying joy! An old letter had beenfound and forwarded which would prove that such a manuscript had existed.But it was not in time to intercept the attorney's letter saying that, theoriginal manuscript being destroyed, there could be no purchase or anyneed of further correspondence. The old letter came. It was genuine beyonda doubt, had been written by one of the party making the journey, and wasitself forty-seven years old. The paper was poor and sallow, thehand-writing large, and the orthography--!

  [Handwriting: Ma bien chair niaice je ressoit ta lette ce mattin]

  But let us translate:

  st. john baptist[1] 10 august 1836

  My very dear Niece. I received your letter this morning in which you askme to tell you what I reme
mber of the journey to Attakapas made in 1795 bypapa, M. -----, [and] my younger sister Francoise afterward yourgrandmother. If it were with my tongue I could answer more favorably; butwriting is not my forte; I was never calculated for a public writer, asyour grandmother was. By the way, she wrote the journey, and veryprettily; what have you done with it? It is a pity to lose so pretty apiece of writing.... We left New Orleans to go to the Attakapas in themonth of May, 1795, and in an old barge ["vieux chalant qui sente le ratmord a plien nez"]. We were Francoise and I Suzanne, pearl of the family,and Papa, who went to buy lands; and one Joseph Charpentier and his dearand pretty little wife Alix [whom] I love so much; 3 Irish, father motherand son [fice]; lastly Mario, whom you knew, with Celeste, formerly lady'smaid to Marianne--who is now my sister-in-law.... If I knew better how towrite I would tell you our adventures the alligators tried to devour us.We barely escaped perishing in Lake Chicot and many other things.... Atlast we arrived at a pretty village St. Martinville called also littleParis and full of barons, marquises, counts and countesses[2] that were anoffense to my nose and my stomach. Your grandmother was in raptures. Itwas there we met the beautiful Tonton, your aunt by marriage. I have a badfinger and must stop.... Your loving aunty [ta tantine qui temme]

  Suzanne ---- nee ----

  The kind of letter to expect from one who, as a girl of eighteen, couldshoot and swim and was called by her father "my son"; the antipode of hersister Francoise. My attorney wrote that the evidence was sufficient.

  His letter had hardly got into the mail-bag when another telegram criedhold! That a few pages of the original manuscript had been found andforwarded by post. They came. They were only nine in all--old, yellow,ragged, torn, leaves of a plantation account-book whose red-ruled columnshad long ago faded to a faint brown, one side of two or three of thempreoccupied with charges in bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin adames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings,lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely,save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and thepage numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here wasevidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriberhad not expanded the work of the original memoirist. The manuscript passedinto my possession, our Creole lady-correspondent reiterating to the endher inability to divine what could be wanted with "an almost illegiblescrawl" (griffonage), full of bad spelling and of rather inelegantdiction. But if old manuscript was the object of desire, why, here wassomething else; the very document alluded to by Francoise in her memoir oftravel--the autobiography of the dear little countess, her beloved Alix deMorainville, made fatherless and a widow by the guillotine in the Reign ofTerror.

  "Was that all?" inquired my agent, craftily, his suspicions aroused by thepromptness with which the supply met the demand. "Had she not other oldand valuable manuscripts?"

  "No, alas! Only that one."

  Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me now, in aninner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its little tight-fittingbag, or case of a kind of bright, large-flowered silken stuff not made inthese days, and its outer wrapper of discolored brief-paper; a prettylittle document of sixty-eight small pages in a feminine hand, perfect inits slightly archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of itsflimsy yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix deMorainville ecrite a la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795. Pour mes cheres amies,Suzanne et Francoise Bossier."

  One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of HarvardUniversity. He generously offered to see if he could find the name of theCount de Morainville on any of the lists of persons guillotined during theFrench Revolution. He made the search, but wrote, "I am sorry to say thatI have not been able to find it either in Prudhomme, 'Dictionnaire desIndividues envoyes a la Mort judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the listgiven by Wallon in the sixth volume of his very interesting 'Histoire duTribunal Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death inParis," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some hours'further search, but in vain.

  Here was distress. I turned to the little manuscript roll of which I hadbecome so fond, and searched its pages anew for evidence of eithergenuineness or its opposite. The wrapper of black paper and theclose-fitting silken bag had not been sufficient to keep it from taking onthe yellowness of age. It was at least no modern counterfeit. Presently Inoticed the total absence of quotation marks from its passages ofconversation. Now, at the close of the last century, the use of quotationmarks was becoming general, but had not become universal and imperative.Their entire absence from this manuscript of sixty-eight pages, aboundingin conversations, meant either age or cunning pretense. But would apretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying themanuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time, layit away in a trunk of old papers, lie down and die without mentioning it,and leave it for some one in the second or third generation afterward tofind? I turned the leaves once more, and lo! one leaf that had had a largecorner torn off had lost that much of its text; it had been written uponbefore it was torn; while on another torn leaf, for there are two, thewriting reads--as you shall see--uninterruptedly around the torn edge; thewriting has been done after the corner was torn off. The two rents,therefore, must have occurred at different times; for the one whichmutilates the text is on the earlier page and surely would not have beenleft so by the author at the time of writing it, but only by some onecareless of it, and at some time between its completion and the manifestlylater date, when it was so carefully bestowed in its old-fashioned silkencase and its inner wrapper of black paper. The manuscript seemed genuine.Maybe the name De Morainville is not, but was a convenient fiction of Alixherself, well understood as such by Francoise and Suzanne. Everythingpoints that way, as was suggested at once by Madame Sidonie de la Houssaye--There! I have let slip the name of my Creole friend, and can only prayher to forgive me! "Tout porte a le croire" (Everything helps thatbelief), she writes; although she also doubts, with reason, I should say,the exhaustive completeness of those lists of the guillotined. "I recall,"she writes in French, "that my husband has often told me the two uncles ofhis father, or grandfather, were guillotined in the Revolution; but thoughsearch was made by an advocate, no trace of them was found in anyrecords."

  An assumed name need not vitiate the truth of the story; but discoveriesmade since, which I am still investigating, offer probabilities that,after all, the name is genuine.

  We see, however, that an intention to deceive, were it supposable, wouldhave to be of recent date.

  Now let me show that an intention to deceive could not be of recent date,and at the same time we shall see the need of this minuteness ofexplanation. Notice, then, that the manuscript comes directly from thelady who says she found it in a trunk of her family's private papers. Aprominent paper-maker in Boston has examined it and says that, while itsage cannot be certified to from its texture, its leaves are of threedifferent kinds of paper, each of which might be a hundred years old. But,bluntly, this lady, though a person of literary tastes and talent, whorecognized the literary value of Alix's _history_, esteemed original_documents_ so lightly as, for example, to put no value upon LouisaCheval's thrilling letter to her brother. She prized this Alix manuscriptonly because, being a simple, succinct, unadorned narrative, she could useit, as she could not Francoise's long, pretty story, for the foundation ofa nearly threefold expanded romance. And this, in fact, she had written,copyrighted, and arranged to publish when our joint experience concerningFrancoise's manuscript at length readjusted her sense of values. She soldme the little Alix manuscript at a price still out of all proportion belowher valuation of her own writing, and counting it a mistake that theexpanded romance should go unpreferred and unpublished.

  But who, then, wrote the smaller manuscript? Madame found it, she says, inthe possession of her very aged mother, the daughter and namesake ofFrancoise. Surely she was not its author; it is she who said she b
urnedalmost the whole original draft of Francoise's "Voyage," because it was"in the way and smelt bad." Neither could Francoise have written it. Herawkward handwriting, her sparkling flood of words and details, and herignorance of the simplest rules of spelling, make it impossible. Nor couldSuzanne have done it. She wrote and spelled no better at fifty-nine thanFrancoise at forty-three. Nor could any one have imposed it on either ofthe sisters. So, then, we find no intention to deceive, either early orrecent. I translated the manuscript, it went to the magazine, and I satdown to eat, drink, and revel, never dreaming that the brazen water-gatesof my Babylon were standing wide open.

  For all this time two huge, glaring anachronisms were staring me, and halfa dozen other persons, squarely in the face, and actually escaping ournotice by their serene audacity. But hardly was the pie--I mean themagazine--opened when these two birds began to sing. Wasn'tthat--interesting? Of course Louis de la Houssaye, who in 1786 "had latelycome from San Domingo," had _not_ "been fighting the insurgents"--who didnot revolt until four or five years afterward! And of course the oldcount, who so kindly left the family group that was bidding Madelaine deLivilier good-bye, was not the Prime Minister Maurepas, who was _not_"only a few months returned from exile," and who was _not_ then "at thepinnacle of royal favor"; for these matters were of earlier date, and this"most lovable old man in the world" wasn't any longer in the world at all,and had not been for eight years. He was dead and buried.

  And so, after all, fraudulent intent or none, _this_ manuscript, just asit is, could never have been written by Alix. On "this 22d of August,1795," she could not have perpetrated such statements as these two. Hermemory of persons and events could not have been so grotesquely at fault,nor could she have hoped so to deceive any one. The misstatements are oflater date, and from some one to whom the two events were historical. Butthe manuscript is all in one simple, undisguised, feminine handwriting,and with no interlineation save only here and there the correction of amiswritten word.

  Now in translating madame's "Voyage de ma Grandmere," I noticed somethingequivalent to an interlineation, but in her own writing like all the rest,and added in a perfectly unconcealed, candid manner, at the end of aparagraph near the close of the story. It struck me as an innocent glossof the copyist, justified in her mind by some well-credited familytradition. It was this: "Just as we [Francoise and Alix] were parting, she[Alix] handed me the story of her life." I had already called my friend'sattention to the anachronisms, and she was in keen distress, becausetotally unable to account for them. But as I further pondered them, thisgloss gained new significance and I mentioned it. My new inquiry flashedlight upon her aged memory. She explained at once that, to connect the twostories of Francoise and Alix, she had thought it right to impute thesefew words to Francoise rather than for mere exactness to thrust a detailedexplanation of her own into a story hurrying to its close. My questioncalled back an incident of long ago and resulted first in her rummaging awhole day among her papers, and then in my receiving the certificate of agentleman of high official standing in Louisiana that, on the 10th of lastApril (1889), this lady, in his presence, took from a large trunk ofwritten papers, variously dated and "appearing to be perfectly genuine," abook of memoranda from which, writes he, "I copy the following paragraphwritten by Madame S. de la Houssaye herself in the middle of the book, onpage 29." Then follows in French:

  June 20, 1841.--M. Gerbeau has dined here again. What a singular story hetells me. We talked of my grandmother and Madame Carpentier, and what doesM. Gerbeau tell me but that Alix had not finished her history when mygrandmother and my aunt returned, and that he had promised to get it tothem. "And I kept it two years for want of an opportunity," he added. Howmad Grandmamma must have been! How the delay must have made her suffer!

  Well and good! Then Alix did write her story! But if she wrote for bothher "dear and good friends," Suzanne and Francoise, then Francoise, theyounger and milder sister, would the more likely have to be content,sooner or later, with a copy. This, I find no reason to doubt, is whatlies before me. Indeed, here (crossed out in the manuscript, but by merestored and italicized) are signs of a copyist's pen: "Mais helas! ildesesperoit de reussir quand' _il desespe_ rencontra," etc. Is not that acopyist's repetition? Or this:"--et lui, mon mari apres tout se fit mon_marim_ domestique." And here the copyist misread the original: "Lorsquele maire entendit les noms et les _personnes_ prenoms de la mariee," etc.In the manuscript personnes is crossed out, and the correct word, prenoms,is written above it.

  Whoever made this copy it remains still so simple and compact that he orshe cannot be charged with many embellishments. And yet it is easy tobelieve that some one, with that looseness of family tradition andlargeness of ancestral pride so common among the Creoles, inhalf-knowledge and half-ignorance should have ventured aside for aninstant to attribute in pure parenthesis to an ancestral De la Houssayethe premature honor of a San Domingan war; or, incited by some traditionof the old Prime Minister's intimate friendship with Madelaine's family,should have imputed a gracious attention to the wrong Count de Maurepas,or to the wrong count altogether.

  I find no other theory tenable. To reject the whole matter as a forgeryflies into the face of more incontestable facts than the anachronisms do.We know, from Suzanne and Francoise, without this manuscript, that therewas an Alix Carpentier, daughter of a count, widow of a viscount, an_emigree_ of the Revolution, married to a Norman peasant, known to M.Gerbeau, beloved of Suzanne and Francoise, with whom they journeyed toAttakapas, and who wrote for them the history of her strange life. I holda manuscript carefully kept by at least two generations of Francoise'sdescendants among their valuable private papers. It professes to be thathistory--a short, modest, unadorned narrative, apparently a copy of apaper of like compass, notwithstanding the evident insertion of twoimpossible statements whose complete omission does not disturb thenarrative. I see no room to doubt that it contains the true story of areal and lovely woman. But to come back to my attorney.

  While his grave negotiations were still going on, there met me one eveningat my own gate a lady in black, seeking advice concerning her wish to sellto some publisher a private diary never intended for publication.

  "That kind is the best," I said. "Did you write it during the late war?" Iadded at a guess.

  "Yes."

  "I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day's publicevents."

  "No, I'm sorry to say--"

  "Nay, don't be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket." Thenmy heart spoke. "Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems tohave seen the importance of doing--written the women's side of that awfulwar--"

  "That's just what I have done," she interrupted. "I was a Union woman, inthe Confederacy. I couldn't talk; I had to write. I was in the siege ofVicksburg from beginning to end."

  "Leave your manuscript with me," I said. "If, on examining it, I find Ican recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But remember what I havealready told you--the passage of an unknown writer's work through an olderauthor's hands is of no benefit to it whatever. It is a bad sign ratherthan a good one. Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less ifyou send this to the publishers yourself."

  No, she would like me to intervene.

  How my attorney friend and I took a two days' journey by rail, reading themanuscript to each other in the Pullman car; how a young newly marriedcouple next us across the aisle, pretending not to notice, listened withall their might; how my friend the attorney now and then stopped to chokedown tears; and how the young stranger opposite came at last, withapologies, asking where this matter would be published and under whattitle, I need not tell. At length I was intercessor for a manuscript thatpublishers would not lightly decline. I bought it for my little museum oftrue stories, at a price beyond what I believe any magazine would havepaid--an amount that must have filled the widow's heart with joy, but ascertainly was not beyond its worth to me. I have already contributed apart of this manuscript to "The Century" as one of its "Wax-pa
pers." Butby permission it is restored here to its original place.

  Judge Farrar, with whom I enjoyed a slight but valued acquaintance,stopped me one day in Carondelet street, New Orleans, saying, "I have atrue story that I want you to tell. You can dress it out--"

  I arrested him with a shake of the head. "Dress me no dresses. Story me nostories. There's not one of a hundred of them that does not lack somethingessential, for want of which they are good for naught. Keep them forafter-dinner chat; but for the novelist they are good to smell, not toeat. And yet--tell me your story. I have a use for it--a cabinet of truethings that have never had and shall not have a literary tool lifted upagainst them; virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events. Itmay be I shall find a place for it there." So he told me the true storywhich I have called "Attalie Brouillard," because, having forgotten thewoman's real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in recounting thetale: "Attalie Brouillard." I repeated the story to a friend, a gentlemanof much reading.

  His reply dismayed me. "I have a faint impression," he said, "that youwill find something very much like that in one of Lever's novels."

  But later I thought, "Even so, what then? Good stories repeat themselves."I remembered having twice had experiences in my own life the accounts ofwhich, when given, would have been great successes only that they were oldanecdotes--great in their day, but long worn out in the club-rooms andabandoned to clergymen's reunions. The wise thing was not to find out orcare whether Lever had somewhere told something like it, but whether thestory was ever a real event in New Orleans, and, if so, to add it to mynow, to me, priceless collection. Meeting the young judge again, I askedboldly for the story's full authentication. He said promptly that the manwho told it of his own knowledge was the late Judge T. Wharton Collins;that the incidents occurred about 1855, and that Judge McCaleb coulddoubtless give the name of the notary public who had been an actor in theaffair. "Let us go to his office right now," said my obliging friend.

  We went, found him, told him our errand. He remembered the story, wasconfident of its entire verity, and gave a name, which, however, he beggedI would submit for verification to an aged notary public in anotherstreet, a gentleman of the pure old Creole type. I went to him. He heardthe story through in solemn silence. From first to last I mentioned noname, but at the end I asked:

  "Now, can you tell me the name of the notary in that case?"

  "Yes."

  I felt a delicious tingling as I waited for the disclosure. He slowlysaid:

  "Dthere eeze wan troub' 'bout dat. To _which_ case do you _riffer? 'Cause,you know, dey got t'ree, four case' like dat_. An' you better not mentionno name, 'cause you don't want git nobody in troub', you know.Now dthere's dthe case of----. And dthere's dthe case of----. And dthere'sthe case of----. He had to go away; yes; 'cause when _he_ make dthe dademan make his will, he git _behine_ dthe dade man in bade, an' hole 'im upin dthe bade."

  I thanked him and departed, with but the one regret that the tale was trueso many more times than was necessary.

  In all this collection the story of the so-called haunted house in Royalstreet is the only one that must ask a place in literature as partly atwice-told tale. The history of the house is known to thousands in the oldFrench quarter, and that portion which antedates the late war was told inbrief by Harriet Martineau as far back as when she wrote her book ofAmerican travel. In printing it here I fulfill an oft-repeated promise;for many a one has asked me if I would not, or, at least, why I did not,tell its dark story.

  So I have inventoried my entire exhibit--save one small matter. It turnedout after, all that the dear old Creole lady who had sold us the ancientmanuscript, finding old paper commanding so much more per ton than it everhad commanded before, raked together three or four more leaves--straychips of her lovely little ancestress Francoise's workshop, or rather theshakings of her basket of cherished records,--to wit, three Creole Africansongs, which I have used elsewhere; one or two other scraps, of no value;and, finally, a long letter telling its writer's own short story--a storyso tragic and so sad that I can only say pass it, if you will. It standsfirst because it antedates the rest. As you will see, its time issomething more than a hundred years ago. The writing was very difficult toread, owing entirely to the badness--mainly the softness--of the paper. Ihave tried in vain to find exactly where Fort Latourette was situated. Itmay have had but a momentary existence in Galvez's campaign against theEnglish. All along the Gulf shore the sites and remains of the small fortsonce held by the Spaniards are known traditionally and indiscriminately as"Spanish Fort." When John Law,--author of that famed Mississippi Bubble,which was in Paris what the South Sea Bubble was in London,--failed in hisefforts at colonization on the Arkansas, his Arkansas settlers came downthe Mississippi to within some sixty miles of New Orleans and establishedthemselves in a colony at first called the _Cote Allemande_ (GermanCoast), and later, owing to its prosperity, the _Cote d'Or_, or GoldenCoast. Thus the banks of the Mississippi became known on the Rhine, agoodly part of our Louisiana Creoles received a German tincture, and thefather and the aunt of Suzanne and Francoise were not the only Alsatianswe shall meet in these wild stories of wild times in Louisiana.

  FOOTNOTES:[1] Name of the parish, or county.--Translator.[2] Royalist refugees of '93.--TRANSLATOR.